New around here? We've got your back! See all our collected tips, tricks and how-to's for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide.

Though I've been playing since open beta, there are still things that I stumble upon that I either didn't know or had forgotten. There are also many little conveniences that took me forever to figure out. So while these tips, tricks and tidbits say they are for rookies -- well, even long time veterans have a few holes in their knowledge of the workings of Azeroth.

Lisa tackled some tips just a couple months ago, so I've scavenged in the comments there as well as in this guest breakfast topic. I am also going to touch on some subjects that come up a lot in the WoW.com guild, <It came from the Blog>.

Built-in Talent Calculator If you, like me, have a tendency to click the wrong thing when choosing your talents, there is a way to set up a safety net. Just go to Game Menu (ESC), Interface, Features and click the Preview Talent Changes box. After that, you will be able to play with your talents a bit before accepting them.


Take a walk Whether you are participating in RP or just want to stay slow while completing an escort quest, the default key to toggle between running and walking is / on your numpad.

Run away! If you want to put your character on autorun while you chat, snack, knit or go take a break; the default key is NUMLOCK. Don't use this if you have people on autofollow or you may have an unintentional incident that will remind people of the lemmings myth.

Wash your mouth out with soap! If you would prefer not to see profanity in game, the Mature Language Filter is located in the Game Menu under Interface and then Social. Of course, misspelled profanity is plentiful and on purpose, so it only does so much.

Diamonds are not forever Putting gems in sockets is not a permanent thing. They can be replaced by just dropping the new gem over the old gem.

You don't have to be all matchy-matchy Gems don't have to match the color of the slot to work. The drawback is that you will lose any socket bonuses. However, not limiting yourself to the color of slot may allow you to stack up on stats that are of better use than the socket bonus.

Multitasking mealtimes I know it's in the in game tips and it may seem really obvious, but I think it took a year before I realized I could eat and drink at the same time.

Druid training If you are leveling all over Azeroth and are a druid, you don't have to go back to your home city for training. There are druid trainers in Moonglade, Silvermoon City and Stormwind.

Realm time Realms are scattered across the time zones (physically or virtually), but realm time can easily be viewed on the clock that is on your minimap. It even shows you the difference between the server time and your desktop time when you mouse over it.

Guild commands There are a few commands that are useful to know if you are in or running a guild:

• /gquit quits the guild
• /gkick does absolutely nothing
• /gremove charactername kicks the character from the guild ( you have to have the appropriate permissions set in your rank to do this)
• /gpromote charactername promotes the character to the next rank up (you have to have the appropriate permissions and be at least 2 ranks above the character you are promoting)
• /gdemote charactername demotes the character to the next rank down (again, you have to have the appropriate permissions set in your rank to do this)

For everything but /gquit, you can use the guild interface to perform these functions; unless the guild is over 500 members and you can't see the character on the roster.

Chat channel commands One of these commands may be essential to your sanity.

• /leave chatchannelnumber leaves a chat channel. For example, you can stop reading tradechat while in major cities by typing /leave 2 and pressing enter.
• /join chatchannelname in order to join a chat channel, you must use the actual name of the channel. So type /join trade to read tradechat again.

You don't have to leave If you want to have trade chat running, but want to make sure that you don't miss any guildchat or whispers, create a new chat tab. Just follow these steps:

1. Rightclick on your General tab.
2. Choose Create New Window.
3. Enter in your new chat tab name (I use "chat" because I'm super creative like that.)
4. Press Accept.

You can rightclick your new tab and fiddle with the Filters to get it right or you can just stay with the defaults which include guildchat and whispers, but not general or tradechat.

You got mail! If you have mail with multiple items in it, just shift-leftclick the letter and all of the items will move over to your inventory at once.

Corpse runs are not mandatory One of the bajillion reasons I loved WoW from the beginning was the fact that you don't have to run to your corpse to res. If your body is in a very inconvenient place, you can just stay in the graveyard, turn around and ask the Spirit Healer to res you. There are penalties that vary with level and she will tell you about them, but sometimes it's worth it. I am still haunted by the memories of multiple hour corpse recoveries after raids in EQ. /shudder

Help! My quests aren't working! Are you in a raid? There are many ways to get stuck in a raid, but you can't turn in or even collect items for non-raid quests if you are in a raid. Just rightclick on your portrait and choose Leave Party.

Please comment any of your favorite things that made you /facepalm when you discovered them. You can use your embarrassing experiences to keep others from doing the same.

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Visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's. WoW Rookie walks you through all sort of new-player concerns, from game lingo for the beginner to joining your first guild as a mid-level player and on to what to do when you finally hit level 80.

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Filed under: WoW Rookie